Only One Player Can Play This Steam Game at a Time – And Only for 60 Seconds

Ever waited in line to play a game? In Jono, that's the whole point. This free Steam release from Part Time Monkey – the solo studio of original Angry Birds artist Tuomas Erikoinen – is a 2D pixel platformer with a twist: only one person on Earth can play it at a time, and only for one minute. Then the next person in the queue takes over from exactly where you left off.

While you wait, you watch a Twitch-like in-game live stream overlay of the current player. You can cheer, advise, or complain in the chat. Spam emotes. Even make the talking head say something stupid. The game's Steam page calls it a "massively singleplayer" experience – and that's not just marketing fluff. It's the first game I've seen that truly fits the description. The goal? For players to collectively complete 1 million totally unique levels. So far, the community has cleared just over 87,600 levels and died 114,200 times in the process. The top player has personally cleared over 7,500 levels.

Jono is free to download and has already garnered 96% positive user reviews on Steam. When I first booted it up, all I had to do was clear a short tutorial and suddenly I was fifth in the queue. On-screen leaderboards show how many rooms the best players have cleared, and customization options for the shared avatar live in the top-left corner by default. There's even an optional "Meat Grinder" mode that collects player-made levels deemed too difficult for normal play – essentially quarantining the Kaizo challenges for only the most hardcore players. One level maker died 1200+ times in the editor just to prove a single level could be done, says Erikoinen. Another level, 'DONT ASK HOW THE MEAT IS MADE,' took 2627 deaths and almost 5 hours before anyone got through.

Erikoinen says it took about a month to make the launch version of Jono, which has been expanded considerably since October 5. Partly inspired by social games like Peter Molyneux's Curiosity – "but not at first to be honest, this idea sort of just came to be out of nowhere," he says – the now-independent Angry Birds artist set out to make something unique. "In this era of AI, smaller games can seem 'too easy to do' (exaggerating a little here, but especially valid for smaller games), so to succeed we now need something truly unique – which sparked up the idea of the queue," Erikoinen explains. "Once the queue was settled, I also wanted to have a looong goal for the community to work towards, hence came the 1M rooms."

Most of the rooms in Jono come from a procedural generation system that splices together different obstacles and modifiers. Player-made levels are reviewed and woven in more sporadically. "When a player creates and verifies a level, they submit it," Erikoinen says. "I check it in the editor with their replay and determine if it's casual enough for the game mode. If it's not, they can choose to put it in the Meat Grinder instead. If it does get approved, it gets put in the main room queue. The room number for it depends on how many player levels are already queued. Every room gets put 100-200 levels later than the previously approved player level."

Building on his point about small games in today's AI-colored age, he adds: "There's been tons of cases where some small game gets popular overnight and it gets replicated within hours, and clones appear on Steam instantly. There's also been cases where someone posts a wip video of their game and that gets cloned instantly. Those are real problems especially for small games. So something like Jono, with a unique twist with not-so-easy to replicate implementations, may be what is needed now. It's just a theory/idea, but I feel it carries some weight to it."

So, will you be jumping into the queue to try your hand at a minute of fame? Or maybe you'll just hang out in the chat and watch the chaos unfold. Either way, Jono is free – and it's waiting for you.